An Update on The Regulatory Readiness Level (RRL): An Objective Measurement of Progress Toward Civil Type Certification

Aircraft Certification is a mature and complex bureaucracy that has successfully ensured a very high degree of safety of aircraft design, construction, operation and maintenance. Outside of a very few professionals doing the work, there is a general lack of knowledge of certification details. For novel technologies such as electric power, and for innovative configurations such as distributed lift and lift-plus-lift-cruise, the rules are far less mature and still emerging and so also poorly understood. Within the Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) initiative, many new aircraft developments are underway using novel configurations, and the public announcements of regulatory progress toward FAA or EASA Type Certification capitalize on this unfamiliarity by being vague or even misleading. Honeywell conceived the Regulatory Readiness Level (RRL) indicator as an objective measure of certification status to serve the AAM industry and ecosystem, with applicability across all of aviation. RRL Version 1 enables a credible, objective assessment of new aircraft progress toward FAA Type Certification, and Operational Approval for Part 135 operations, to allow consistent apples-to-apples comparisons with other aircraft in development. Future RRL releases with allow determination of progress against criteria from EASA and other regulatory authorities, for supplemental types certifications STCs), and for risk-based airworthiness assessments such as EASA Specific Operations Risk Assessments (SORA).